Daisy picked up a handful of black soot from the ground and smeared it on the only remaining wall of her home, which just a week before had been beautiful and whole and the place where she had felt safe and secure. Wrong she wrote in big, bold letters and then she walked over to stare at the charred remains of her bed, everything gone except for the metal springs that had made jumping on it when she was just a toddler such a treat. The day was hot; the smell of burned wood and house furnishings and clothing, acrid in her nose. A bead of sweat slid down her forehead and plopped into one of her eyes, mixing with the tears that threatened to spill down her cheeks. How strange to think that just seven days ago she’d had four friends over for a slumber party to celebrate for her fifteenth birthday, and now she was dealing with the after-effects of a stupid accident that had changed her life – and her family’s – forever.
Heat stabbed her back and she turned. The sun’s rays were silver lightning as they pierced through the charred oak tree limbs where she had climbed daily when she was ten, the year her twin brothers were born. “Nobody ever asked me if I wanted more siblings,” she remembered saying to her parents. “I have been, still want to be, an only child.” Pain attacked her, as if those limbs had broken off and were poking right through her heart.
The crunch of footsteps made her turn. There stood her dad, now looking more like a grandfather than the fifty-year-old man who’d described the rising tide of the Pacific on their last trip to Maui as “water that rose as gently as a butterfly from a flower petal.” Her poetic father who referred to her as “comely” and who had been responsible for naming her Daisy because his grandmother’s house had been surrounded by orange daisies with brown centers and she’d be born with carrot colored hair and brown eyes.
“This life has been brought to a halt unfinished,” Dad said with a sigh.
Daisy slipped her hand into her father’s and squeezed his fingers.
He turned and stared at the word written on the wall. “Wrong,” he read, then suddenly laughed. “Yes, wrong thinking. That’s what all of this is. Too focused on material possessions rather than on what’s really important.”
Just then a horn honked and Mother drove up, the twins in the back seat, their arms swathed in white gauze. “I have fried chicken from the Colonel,” she said, her voice happier than it should be. “Let’s go sit under that far tree and imagine what kind of house we want next time round.”
The boys bounced up and down in the back, excited. “Separate bedrooms!” they shouted in unison, as if prompted right on cue by their identical DNA.
“And you, sweet girl? What is it you want in our new house?” Her dad put his arm around her shoulder.
Her father’s warmth seemed to melt away the tension that had been balled up inside Daisy since the fire. She walked back over to the wall, picked up a piece of charred wood and considered what was the real lesson from the accident. Just then she noticed something red amid the blackened rubble. A cardinal pecked at the ashes, then rose and flew up into the branches of the half burned oak tree. She smiled, wrote, then walked with her dad to join the rest of her family. Her new message read: Wrong to Give Up.
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